Opinion – Dating apps will ruin your self esteem even if you’re good looking

TLDR:

This is my experience with dating apps.
I think that these apps are beneficial to some extent to good looking people even though it will mess with their brains eventually too.

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28M – I've been on dating apps for as long as I can remember and was always looking for ways to get more out of them.
I tried all sorts of stuff: different bios, weird photo ideas I read online that were supposed to make me look approachable, auto swipers with cooldowns and random left swipes to avoid getting ranked low.
I even tried hacking the algorithm but that didn't work either.

I was obsessed with getting matches because I thought it would make me feel more wanted and valuable.
This craziness went on when I was 18-21.
Back then I was honestly pretty ugly – below average height, skinny, with a crooked nose from breaking it twice.
But weirdly my confidence was really high until I discovered dating apps and they completely destroyed it.

I was getting no matches at all. Absolutely nothing. It crushed me.
I became even more obsessed and my only goal was to prove I was worth at least one girl's attention.
I wanted validation so badly!
When nothing worked I decided I had enough and told myself I'd never use dating apps again.

That's when I started meeting girls in real life – coffee places, on the street, bars and clubs.
Let me tell you it was like winning the lottery.
Everything felt so real and scary but also fun and exciting.
Even when I got rejected it felt more authentic than swiping like crazy hoping some random girl would notice me.

Fast forward to age 25: I'd grown a beard, fixed my nose, built muscle, traveled extensively, and become objectively attractive.
Despite my earlier vow, moving to a new city made me curious to see if anything has changed.
The results really shocked me.
I got over 400 likes on OkCupid within days.
I felt like a celebrity, seeing numbers I thought only women experienced.
My profile was identical to before – same bio, same question responses.
The only difference were my photos, because I looked like a completely different person.
I went on a respectable number of dates and talked to a lot of girls.

But then, after about a month, the matches began declining.
Back to maybe 1-2 likes daily, which terrified me.
After experiencing that initial rush, this felt like performing my favorite song to a packed audience, only to watch them all walk away mid-performance.

I realized I was letting likes and matches define my self-worth.
High numbers meant happiness, low numbers meant discouragement.
So I deleted my account and made a new one and boom – over a hundred likes again just like that.

This was my eureka moment.

These companies don't want you to succeed.
They don't want you to find love and they don't want you to leave their app.
They'll give you a "boost" of likes when you create a new account but when that boost is done you get NOTHING.
Even when you do have likes they won't match you with those people because they want you to pay for premium.

Once you're on their app they own you.
They own your self esteem, your self worth, and they decide whether you get matches or not.

Don't get me wrong I totally understand why they lock good features behind paywalls to make money but we need to understand this so we don't get caught up thinking our entire dating worth is defined by an app.

Even as a good looking guy who got a decent amount of matches I was still hooked on the idea that I am what the app says I am.
I was tying my self worth to it too much.

The real you is out there in the world beyond the screen.
While apps can sometimes give you comfort or in rare cases help you find your soulmate, they're usually not designed to help you.
Quite the opposite – the longer you stay ON the app the more MONEY you potentially make them.

There's a beautiful world out there with people who are hungry for real human connection.
I experience subreddits as mostly negative places where people are often very discouraged about things.
I created this post to encourage people to step out of their shell and go out there and test themselves and see what lies on the other side of their fear.